Facebook: threat or menace?

The Chronicle of Higher Ed fires another salvo at social software, with an article (or opinion piece, actually, and curiously located in the Careers section) against the Facebook.  Many have already ripped into it, including Stephen Downes. But I can't resist poking at the twitching thing.

I'm impressed by the way the author uses the Facebook to summon up many other technologies (then drop them).  He then turns this one social networking tool into a synecdoche for technology and higher education. 
Even more ambitiously, Bujela associates Facebook with a terrifying swarm of Bad Things: homophobia, plagiarism, bad taste, addiction, technofetishism, declining faculty salaries, shrinking audiences for news media, commodification of the self, security threats, impersonation, and social isolation.  (Where's copyright infringement?  Are file-sharers too isolated? Call the RIAA! their problems are solved!)

And, once again, we see a writer grabbing Christina Rosen's arguments without looking very hard at them.

Comments

[John Martin]

I argued many of the same points as you and Stephen. The Facebook statement was simply a vehicle to launch into a argument that was at best flawed. It's good to know that the article is not going unanswered.

Cheers!

-john-